According
to press materials, Paulo Coelho’s New Agey fables have racked up 165 million
net copy sales around the world. Clearly people are reading him, but there is
no need to buy his books, considering he grants his fans permission to download
his work through file-sharing sites. Regardless, he remains a record-holding
bestseller, but the Brazilian publishing industry did not always recognize his
commercial potential. Coelho’s portrait-of-the-author-as-a-sad-young-man story
is incorporated into his supposedly autobiographical first book, The Pilgrimage in Daniel Augusto’s Paulo Coelho’s Best Story (trailer here), which opens today
in New York.
The
sage-like modern day Coelho has just had major surgery, but he is not one to
sit around a hospital room idly recovering. Much to his indulgent wife’s
surprise, he decides to attend the party celebrating the twenty-fifth
anniversary of his biggest hit, The
Alchemist. Normally, Coelho does not go in for these crass publicity
events, so it is a lead pipe cinch that mysterious signs will lead him on a
spiritual detour.
Meanwhile,
fifty years ago, Coelho is a suicidal kid growing up during the days of the military
regime. He desperately wants to be a writer, but his establishment father keeps
asking unsupportive questions, like how are you going to makes a living that
way. Ten years and a few shock therapy sessions later, Coelho is hedonistic
hippy, building a reputation as counter-cultural polemicist. Eventually, the
military government picks him up, alarmed by the openly Satanic Aleister
Crowley-inspired lyrics he penned for Raul Seixas, thereby causing suspicions
the entire film is a bizarre scheme to build sympathy for the old junta.
Eventually,
scruffy Coelho has a spiritual awakening, finds his master in Spain, and joins
the crypto-Catholic secret society RAM (Rigor, Amor, Misericordia) by
completing a pilgrimage on the road to Santiago de Compostela. Forty some years
later, with fresh surgical scars, Coelho realizes he must retrace his steps to
prove some kind of point.
Honestly,
the whole concept of Best Story does
not make much sense. It is constantly acknowledging The Alchemist is the book his fans really love, but it insists on
giving them The Pilgrimage instead.
The constant flashing forward and backward creates an unsightly rest’s nest of
a narrative. Arguably, the cast is fine, but their dialogue is laughable and if
you can keep track of Coelho’s girlfriends you are doing better than he is.
Frankly, the three Coelhos hardly seem like the same person. The mopey teen victim,
debauched pseudo-intellectual, and nauseatingly pompous New Age icon really
have absolutely nothing in common, except they are all completely insufferable.
